


Every Atom of My Blood

by tomato_greens



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-12
Updated: 2011-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:32:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Even you wouldn't threaten a new mother," Mal says with the utter surety of someone safe in her own home, with old friends about her. "And I would never dream saying anything about Arthur's girlish figure, particularly as he's standing right behind you." // Canon character death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Atom of My Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the delightful and talented [terribilita](http://terribilita.livejournal.com). This fic is based very loosely on [La Châtelaine de Vergy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Chatelaine_de_Vergy), a poem I read for a class earlier this semester, and borrows heavily from Whitman's [Song of Myself](http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html), because I am a hipster-loving jerk at heart. (TRUFAX: A line in this poem reads "There was never any more inception than there is now....") Originally posted in response to [this prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/17044.html?thread=35495572#t35495572) on [the Inception Kink Meme](http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink). Mal and Eames don't really get screen time together and their friendship isn't my personal canon, but I wanted to ~explore~ it.

"The thing is," Arthur says, kissing him gently on the side of the mouth, "the thing is, you can't tell anyone."

Eames nods desperately. "No one," he agrees, shifting his hips forward. "Not a soul."

Arthur strokes the skin under Eames's left eye and kisses him again: a promise.

-

The first time Eames meets Arthur, he's twenty-four years old and cocksure, a rockstar, at the top of his field. He hits on nearly everyone reflexively, still not used to sheepishly having to turn them down later.

Eames has just finished assuring the newly-minted Mrs. Cobb that no, really, he _could_ make it worth her while when he turns around to be introduced to the new recruit.

"Cobb, what are you doing, running a nursery?" he says. "This one's just a baby!"

"He's older than you are," Cobb says dryly. "And he's not new. Eames, meet Arthur."

"Arthur?" Eames asks. "Really? _The_ Arthur? Arthur Who Knows Everyone and To Whom Everyone Owes a Favor? That Arthur?"

Arthur scowls. He's got a terrible haircut and his suit is at least a size too big. It's _delightful_. "Yes, that Arthur," he says shortly, brushing past Eames and into the next room.

"Was it something I said?" Eames asks. He hasn't gotten to be forlorn in a while––the feeling sinks deliciously into his bones.

"Yes, I rather think it was," Mal answers, kissing him on each cheek. "Welcome home, darling. It's been too long."

-

Arthur is uptight, and boring, and ruthlessly competent. Eames alternates between being extremely irritated by him and helplessly turned on.

"It's no use complaining to me, you know," Mal says one night, sitting with him on their porch while Cobb puts the kids to bed. She's tipped the last of the bottle into Eames's wine glass and is swirling her own glass around, more out of habit, Eames knows, than any desire to properly aerate it.

"I haven't even said anything," Eames says, more petulantly than he's aiming for.

"I haven't known you since you were wet behind the ears for nothing, Mr. Eames," Mal answers, reaching out to rub his hair affectionately. "Don't forget that I knew you before."

"Before what?" Eames challenges.

Mal makes a noise like she's rolling her eyes and drinks her wine. "Before everything."

It's true; Mal's known him since they were both in the business legitimately, with academic grants and everything, before Cobb came into the picture, before the funding got cut, before the military got too involved––but he doesn't have to like it, their mutual past.

(He does, of course, he loves it, the intimate bridge of their friendship. But it's still inconvenient at times like this.)

"I wasn't going to, anyway," he says. "Complain, I mean."

"No, you were just going to sigh and mope around and ruin my evening," Mal says, laughing gently. "Arthur is prickly, but he's a good man. If you'd just talk to him––"

"And why would I ever do that?" Eames asks, totally flabbergasted.

"If you talked to him," Mal insists, "if he saw he were upsetting you, he would stop doing whatever it is that is so disagreeable to you, I'm sure."

"But he wouldn't stop being Arthur," Eames says, puzzled. "Which is sort of the problem."

"Oh, Eames," Mal sighs.

"Oh, Mal," Eames imitates.

"Stop being such a drag," she says.

"I am never," Eames starts, but she's right––he is. "Sorry," he mumbles, subsiding.

"Why do you let him do this to you?" Mal asks, staring up at the stars. "I mean, believe me, I am well aware of Arthur's multitudes of charms, but I also have had many conversations with him that don't end in gunfire or hurt feelings or by the intervention of a wonderful French woman. What's so––Arthur, about him?"

"I don't know," Eames admits like he's in pain. "I don't know."

"Ah!" Mal says, sitting up straight. "That's it."

"What's it?"

"He's a mystery to you!" She points at him with the hand that's still preoccupied with holding her wine glass. "That's why you like him so much. You look at all of us and you know so much but you look at him and you can't figure out what he's thinking."

"Not true," Eames says, offended. "He loves you, he worships the ground Dom walks on, he's immensely irritated by me, tempered by very occasional attraction––trust me, Mal, trust me, don't make that face, I live for people being attracted to me, I'm sure––he likes coffee more than he should, he's probably, oh, I'd say the youngest or second youngest in his family, he's––"

"All right, maybe you've figured him out. But could you forge him?"

Eames bristles. "Sure."

"Well enough to fool me?" Mal asks, eyebrow raised coolly.

God, she's so endlessly _charming_ , it's disgusting. "Probably not yet," he admits, deflating. "He's a hard man to know well."

Mal sits back again, chuckling to herself. "Eames, Eames," she says, "Eames. You don't love Arthur. You love a challenge."

"No one said anything about love!" Eames says, choking back the last of his wine and standing up. "I'm going to bed to forget this conversation ever happened. I hope you have a terrible hangover in the morning."

"Good night," Mal calls as he leaves her, sitting alone on her porch swing, mostly-empty wine glass in one hand and her chin in the other.

-

"I mean it," Arthur says in the morning, while they're lying in bed together. Eames's alarm is going to go off in thirteen minutes and he's not looking forward to it. "I don't––I'm a private person, anyway, you know that, and I don't know how well Cobb could handle. Well. This. Not now. Not with Mal like she is."

"What, you having sex?" Eames asks, disgruntled. "Isn't that a little childish, even for Mr. Maturity? You're a grown man, Arthur."

"No, not me having sex," Arthur says, shaking his head. "Me being happy."

Eames sucks in a breath and turns to face him more fully. "And are you happy?" he asks, reaching forward to caress Arthur's neck with the hand that isn't currently held captive by the small of Arthur's back.

"Don't make me say it twice, Mr. Eames," Arthur says.

"Yeah?" Eames breathes, inching closer. "How shall you ever stop me?"

-

"Eames," Arthur says. "Pleasure to see you again."

Eames looks him up and down as appreciatively as he knows how. The haircut's all right now that it's slicked back, even if it does make him look like a shady character from some 1930s crime novel, and the old suit has been replaced by one that fits him, god, perfectly––he definitely doesn't look fourteen anymore. "No, no, no," he corrects, his voice as breathy and lush as he can get it without embarrassing himself anymore than he's used to. "The pleasure's all mine."

"I take it you two know each other?" Siobhan, their extractor, says, clearly amused.

Arthur rolls his eyes, but Eames sees him grin a little out of the corner of his eye and feels a little thrill of hope take residence at the base of his spine.

All in all, the job turns out to be a success.

-

"Do you ever wonder about the deeper levels, Eames?" Mal asks him.

They're working a job in Rio, and, frankly, Eames wants to sit out in the sun all day and soak up the warmth like a very large and content reptile. Arthur works without Cobb but Cobb never works without Arthur, so of course Arthur's here, too, his shirtsleeves rolled up, the two top buttons of his bespoke shirts perpetually undone. It's very distracting. Eames spends more time imagining the deeper levels of Arthur's wardrobe than he does the dream world, but he shrugs noncommittally. "I guess," he answers. "It's interesting, but I left the academics of this a long time ago."

"I just want to know," she says. "I have this, this aching desire to know what's next, what happens after, what happens when we go forward."

"Mal?" he asks. "Are you all right?"

"I'm pregnant," she says. "Dom doesn't know yet."

-

Phillipa is a bright-eyed goddess of a baby, loud and demanding and needy, with a thatch of blonde hair on the crown of her head like a flame in the night. Eames loves her with an authenticity of feeling he's usually inspired to by Mal and the cheaper kind of reality television programs.

"Pippa, Pippa, Pippa," he says, bouncing her on his knee.

"Absolutely not," Mal says from where she's lying in her marriage bed, looking wan even so many days after delivery. "I will not have you nicknaming my child without my consent."

"Mal," Eames says very seriously. "Nicknames are sacred. I wouldn't pick just any. This is the highest caliber nickname available for the name Phillipa, I'll have you know––I Googled it and everything."

Mal _hmmphs_ , then smiles. "Give her to me," she says. "I want my baby back."

Eames hands her over reluctantly and sits back down. "I never knew I could be so whipped by someone so much smaller than me."

Mal stops cooing at Phillipa to smirk at him.

Eames points at her warningly. "Oh no. Any words said about my very handsome and manly bulk and Arthur's girlish figure and I'll kill you."

"Even you wouldn't threaten a new mother," Mal says with the utter surety of someone safe in her own home, with old friends about her. "And I would never dream saying anything about Arthur's girlish figure, particularly as he's standing right behind you."

He whirls around, and yes, there Arthur is, all seventy lean inches of him, wearing his usual dress shirt and _jeans_ ––Eames is going to fall apart and die of lust in front of a baby, it's really very shameful.

"Hello, Eames," Arthur says. "Casting aspersions on my character again?"

"I have never done anything of the sort," Eames protests, which is patently untrue.

"Not without due cause, I'm sure," Arthur counters, which is actually quite right. He comes up behind Eames's chair and asks, "Can I hold the baby?"

Mal heaves a sigh and indicates the empty space on the bed next to her. "Only if you are sitting, and only if I can still touch her. Everybody wants to hold her all the time. I want her all to myself."

Arthur comes around and sits down, reaching for Phillipa and smiling down at her, Mal's hand still resting on the small pinkish bundle. Phillipa is too small to smile back, of course, but Eames can imagine it in future years, Arthur's dimples, Phillipa's answering toothy grin, well-loved. It makes him ache.

"Isn't this nice," he says, not bitterly, and leaves to get drunk at a bar three towns over.

-

"I don't know what I'm going to do without her," Cobb says. "She's slipping away every day and I'm so––I don't know. I just. I can't."

Eames knows Arthur's right about Cobb's inability to handle the news about the two of them, right then, so he doesn't offer anything but premature condolences. The Mal who fingers knives and refuses to talk to him isn't the Mal he knows and loves, and he can't help but believe that someday she'll snap out of it, that someday this postpartum or whatever it is will lift and they'll get on all right again.

"I don't think you should come around here anymore," Cobb says.

Eames swallows hard, and holds close the memory of Phillipa's little kicking feet, James's first exploratory punch to his nose. They have always been such wonderfully violent children. "If you think that's best," he says.

"Is that man pretending to be Eames?" Mal's voice shrieks from inside the house. "Tell him to go away until he can be himself again."

Cobb looks out into the middle distance, a thousand-yard stare. "James and Phillipa are visiting their grandparents," he says, like an explanation, maybe, although Eames isn't sure that it explains anything at all.

"I'll go," he says instead of trying to make sense of it. "Call me when she's better."

Cobb nods.

-

"I want another baby," Mal says to him, hushed.

"I really think this is the kind of thing you should be discussing with your husband," Eames says.

-

James isn't as pretty as Phillipa was, smaller and squashier, with a permanently scrunched up look on his little baby face.

"Isn't he the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?" Mal asks.

Eames looks at the two of them, fitting like jigsaw pieces. "Yes," he says, honestly.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," Mal confesses. "I have so much love in me. I feel like I'm going to burst."

Eames is uncomfortable at best with emotional declarations, but even he knows that physically exploding due to happiness is unlikely.

"I thought it would split, or something," Mal says wonderingly. "Like a love amoeba. But no. Instead it grew." She looks at Eames with shining eyes. "I didn't know I could hold so much."

"We contain multitudes," Eames murmurs.

"Save your poetry to woo Arthur with," Mal retorts, unimpressed.

"Believe me, if I thought it would get me anywhere, I would," Eames grumbles.

"Maybe Arthur contains multitudes, too," Mal says.

-

"Oh my god, let's just––let's just never get out of bed," Arthur says.

"This sounds like the best plan you've ever had," Eames says, breathing hard. "Please will you be my point man forever."

Arthur hits him lightly.

"Kinky!" Eames squawks, and kisses the would-be dominatrix out of him.

Or maybe it's dominator. Whatever. Grammar: not Eames's best skill set. (Kissing Arthur: definitely getting up there.)

-

"Do you trust me?" Mal asks.

"Always," Eames promises.

-

The call, when it comes a few days later, isn't about Mal getting better.

Eames never knew what it meant to _have the wind knocked out of you_ until that moment––until the phone drops out of his fingers, until he and Arthur curl together on the carpet, stricken, silent. He can't breathe.

-

"Come with me," Mal says the last time they speak face-to-face. "Dom won't believe me and Arthur can't see it, but you, Eames, you have always had a better grasp on reality than either of them, than me, even, most of the time."

"Mal," Eames says carefully, "Mal, what are you talking about?"

"Can't you tell?" Mal's voice is desperate. "Can't you see it? Or are you just another one of them?"

"I don't know what you're saying," he says. Cobb had said _unstable_ , had said _disturbing_ , but Eames hadn't ever imagined it being like this––like one of the valves in his heart has stopped working, like he's frozen in his skin.

"I feel like there's a devil inside of me!" Mal screams at him. "I need to be exorcised. This world needs to be––can't you tell? Help me, Eames."

Eames knows he shouldn't play into her delusions, but whenever Mal calls him, he comes running––he always will, it's built into him, a response so Pavlovian it's become instinct. "If I can," he says cautiously.

"I know you love him," she says, suddenly. It doesn't have the feeling of a non sequitur but it seems like one; Eames feels whiplashed. "You won't say it, but I can tell. I love Dom, too, Eames, but it's only because they don't know. It's only because they're caught in the last layer."

He's getting nervous. "Mal," he starts.

"Don't Mal me," she says, her voice back to being hard and broken. "This is not real, Eames. We need to wake up. Wake up with me, Eames. Bring me home to my children, to my husband."

Eames shakes his head. "This isn't––it's not like that, Mal. You know it isn't."

She stares at him, her face transformed by anger. "Get out," she says icily.

"Mal––"

"You are not my Eames," she barks. "You aren't real! _Get out._ "

Eames edges out of the room, which, he can see, no longer has her hair dryer, her jewelry, her nail scissors or Cobb's ties; it's been infant-proofed for years but this goes so far beyond that that his blood runs cold.

"I'll be back tomorrow," he says on his way out. Cobb, staring at the same cup of coffee he's been looking at since Eames got here, grunts his reply.

-

"I should have known," Eames says, long after the receiver has started emitting its off-the-hook signal. He hasn't used a landline in so long he's forgotten how obnoxious it is; it reverberates in his skull like an alarm, too late, too late. "I should have stopped her."

"You couldn't have," Arthur says, kissing his forehead, finally plucking the phone from his numb fingers and replacing it. The room is cast into blessed silence. "You couldn't have known. None of us did."

-

"Do I contradict myself?" Mal whispers.

"Hmmm?" Eames asks. He is more than half-asleep and a little drunk besides, and the room is fuzzy and warm around him.

"Oh, nothing," Mal says, and laughs brightly.

-

"Hypothetically, if I asked you out for a drink––hypothetically, mind you––would you go?" Eames asks Arthur.

Arthur considers. "Have I recently been babysitting?"

"Is that likely to increase the chances in my favor?" Eames asks.

"My desire for alcohol rises in proportion to the number of children I have been stuck with for innumerable hours while their erstwhile parents are canoodling in some dark abandoned movie theater," Arthur says, with admirable vitriol.

"Have you recently been babysitting?" Eames wonders aloud.

"Yes, I'll go for a drink with you," Arthur says.

-

"Please, Arthur," Eames says. He's a weak man. There are a thousand things he should be doing or thinking about, a thousand celestial rings that forever circle Mal––but all he really wants in the world right now is for Arthur to kiss him. "Please."

"Yeah, okay," Arthur says, who doesn't know Mal like Eames does, who doesn't know how far she's fallen, who thinks she's under the weather or in a blue spell;s Eames clings to it. "Yes."

-

The first time Eames meets Mal, he's nineteen years old and nervous as hell, a dreamsharing prodigy. He's too afraid of her to hit on her even though she's objectively the most beautiful person he's ever met; she is, after all, the professor's daughter.

"Hi," he says.

"Hello," she says, "come in, come in." She's immaculate, even in blue jeans, and she smells the way a field of wild poppies looks. "You're Eames, yes?"

He nods. Somehow he hadn't expected the French accent.

"My father's treasured protégé," she continues, sounding neither menacing nor awkward, and he ducks his head shyly. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Eames."

"It's nice to meet you, too," he mumbles. "Miss, uh, Miles."

She holds out a hand for him to shake. "Don't be so nervous, my love," she says, and even though she can't be more than two or three years older than him, he feels like she's ahead by lifetimes. "I've heard all about you."

"Only good things, I hope," he says.

"Nothing too terrible to strike from memory, anyway," she says, and smiles, and he knows everything's going to be fine.

-

"Dom's leaving the country," Arthur says.

"Is he," says Eames. It isn't a surprise. Eames probably would, too, with evidence like that, even if there isn't enough forensics to make it stick. Cobb's wanted for a whole list of things, though the government doesn't know it's him specifically. "And what are your thoughts on this?"

"I'm," Arthur says, and takes a deep breath. Eames suddenly knows what he's about to say before he says it, wills him not to, to come back to their bed. "I'm going with him."

-

"Your man does good work," Eames says. The dossier is streamlined, but thorough, and entirely useful.

"Arthur," Mal says. Eames recognizes the name, the way it elicits a spark between them: their first underground contact, made a few months ago, when Dom Cobb was still just a rumor. "Dom calls him a point man."

Eames laughs, a little startled. "Good name for it."

"I thought it was nicely subversive, yes," Mal says. "The hostile territory of the mind."

"Any chance I'll get to meet him?"

Mal shrugs, shakes her head. "He's private. I haven't met him yet, either."

"Well, send along my thanks for the information, at least," Eames says.

-

"Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?" Arthur asks, four beers in.

"What?" Eames, who has had rather a lot more hard liquor, asks.

"I said––never mind," Arthur corrects himself. "People seem to think I'm more complicated than I am."

"You probably are," Eames says.

"What, I'm probably more complicated than I think I am?"

Eames tosses back the last of his whiskey and nods. "Most people are."

"I guess you'd know, wouldn't you?" Arthur muses, looking darkly into his glass.

Eames nods. "I guess. More than I want to." At Arthur's disbelieving glance, he hastens to add, "I can't help it. I just––I just know things about people, about what they want, or need, or something."

"Me too? You know things about me?"

Eames deflates. "Not really," he says. "Not for lack of trying, though."

Arthur looks pleased at that. He would, the tricky bastard.

"You want to know things about me?" Arthur says, another drink in.

"I guess," Eames says, meaning, _Of course_.

Arthur spreads his hands wide. "Just ask."

-

"They're going to run you down hard, you know," Eames says.

"I know," Arthur says, and hesitates before touching Eames's elbow. "Come with me."

Eames wants terribly to melt into Arthur, but: "I don't think I can."

Arthur closes his eyes and appears to settle wearily into himself before opening them again. "You're sure?"

Eames thinks about Mal, about Phillipa and her smile, James, his face not quite finished being squashy, about Miles and the frown lines that no longer relax. He thinks about Arthur and about Cobb, about the team they've always been. "I was never any good at being the third wheel, darling."

Arthur breaks into a watery smile. "Go to sleep, Mr. Eames," he says, kissing him one last time.

-  
"Do you think it's possible, Eames?" Mal asks, looking at the PASIV in wonder. "Inception?"

Eames, high on the physics of it all, nods enthusiastically. "What isn't possible?" he asks, kissing her on both cheeks.

"What isn't?" Mal asks, too, and he can feel both of them reimagine the world, together.

 

EPILOGUE

 

They do it, they _do it_ , they pull it off, and coming down in LAX is like landing in a pool of sticky relief. Cobb gets through security and Eames almost throws up from happiness.

"Well, to be frank, that was kind of a surprise," Arthur says.

"Tell me about it," Eames says, staring at the baggage carousel.

"I've got this apartment," Arthur starts, but doesn't continue. The air hangs heavy with waiting.

"I know," Eames says, finally. "I've been there."

"It's a different one," Arthur says. "From last time."

Eames looks at him. "Bigger?"

"Smaller, actually."

"You surprise me."

"You just have to ask."

Eames darts forward to grab his bag. "What?"

"Never mind." Arthur clears his throat. "I haven't––it's been a long time since I saw you last."

"Yes," Eames says. His chest cavity feels empty and vulnerable. "I'd noticed."

"And. Well."

"Look, Arthur," Eames says, because it's been years and his heart's not mended itself yet; it's still scarred over, still sore. "It's been a long flight and I'm tired. I really just want to check myself into a hotel and lie on a bed."

"I've got a couch," Arthur says, quietly, avoiding Eames's gaze. "An extra blanket. If you're interested, I mean. If you want."

Eames blinks, and coughs. "Just a couch?"

"I told you this one was smaller," Arthur says apologetically. "No guest bedroom."

Eames murmurs, "I stopped somewhere, waiting for you." He coughs again. "I don't want to do that anymore, Arthur."

Arthur gives up then, stops his stupid stoic act and looks Eames hopefully in the eye. "I could offer more than the couch, if you wanted."

And Eames––Eames, he says, "Yes."


End file.
